Gamesugar

I’ve been anticipating Rock Band 3 for a while now, and figured that I’d chronicle my experiences with the game in comic form. I couldn’t imagine how they’d mess up something like Rock Band, but I was sure there would be some changes that I should give mention.

Not since the first Rock Band have I been so overwhelmed by the amount of things Harmonix is trying to add to the genre. They added a keyboard, 3-part harmonies, and more realistic peripherals for the drums and guitar that add three cymbals and 92 buttons on the neck respectively. It’s the Spruce Goose of band-based music games, and I’m curious to see how high off of the ground it’ll get. New instruments aren’t the only change, though…

The character customization is dramatically improved from the previous games; it’s changed from “which of these ten faces kinda resembles mine?” to “I’m going to take front and profile-view pictures of my face and make an afternoon of accurately creating myself in this game!” Since your in-game band is prominently displayed throughout the game’s menus and loading screens, this is an amazing, yet borderline creepy feature. Another change is the elimination of the money system – in order to unlock new clothes and instruments, you have to accomplish certain goals, which is a fun system, albeit flawed.

So yeah, I got the keyboard, one of the new peripherals that came out with this game. I haven’t played the piano in well over a decade, and it turns out that it’s not like riding a bike at all.

When I started this comic, I had no intention of getting the keyboard in the near future, and having gotten it a couple of days ago, I don’t have much else to say at this time. I went into it simply to critique RB3 as a gigantic track pack with a slick new interface, and it succeeds greatly in that regard. Rock Band 3 provides you with a new central hub for all the songs you’ve ever played in a Rock Band game (with the exception of 10 songs from older games, plus those Beatles ones) and adds a staggering 83 more that are on the disc.

The integration of DLC and exports in world tour mode is vastly improved over previous games. In theory, if you have a big enough library of songs, you can complete the new, more streamlined world tour mode without playing a single one of the 83 new songs on the disc, though I wouldn’t recommend doing that. While it’s painfully obvious that many of the new songs were selected solely to accommodate the new keyboard, there are a lot of great new songs (Woo! Metric!) and even a bunch of old favorites.

Quite a few songs from older Guitar Hero games make a reappearance in RB3 – really good ones too, such as Smoke on the Water, The Beast & the Harlot, and Freebird. Combined with DLC and exports, you can recreate respectably large chunks of these old games all from the comfort of one disc. Additionally, these versions aren’t covers and can be played with a crapload of new instruments. This is the kind of revisionist history that I can really get behind.

Overall Rock Band 3 is for the most part a drastic upgrade from Rock Band 2, which has held strong for the past two years. I’d go so far as to say that it’s a mandatory upgrade, since all upcoming DLC will only work for RB3.